Katz puts a number on October 7, and the referee pulls Netanyahu’s air force video

In a statement on 5 October carried by the Times of Israel’s liveblog, Defence Minister Israel Katz said: “6,000 terrorists crossed the border into Israel on October 7 and carried out the atrocities. Of them, 4,000 have been killed so far, leaving another 2,000.” The Times of Israel’s Emanuel Fabian summarised it the next day as “Katz: IDF has killed two-thirds of Oct. 7 perpetrators, will eliminate remaining 2,000.” The arithmetic is the minister’s own and is not independently auditable. It also sits well above the count in common reference use: the Hebrew-calendar memorial-day entry on Wikipedia puts the 2023 infiltration at around 3,500 militants, who killed 1,150 people including 779 civilians and took roughly 253 hostages. Katz is working from a base figure some seventy per cent larger than that, and from a kill tally no outside body has verified.

At the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem on 6 October, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “Because Hamas is so weak, it will try to challenge us with the remnants of its forces ahead of the election in an attempt to influence it. We are prepared for this.” Katz said Israel held intelligence that Hamas planned to target IDF troops in Gaza on the third anniversary, and warned that Hamas and Gaza civilians would “pay the price.” The Times of Israel’s headline verb was “claims.” The same day, Supreme Court Deputy Chief Justice Noam Sohlberg, chairing the Central Elections Committee, ordered Netanyahu to remove from his personal social media accounts a video filmed at an Israeli Air Force base. Whether he complied was not established in our sweep.

Assessment: Two things are happening at once and they should be read together. A sitting defence minister is issuing a war-accounting figure that no institution outside the ministry can check, and the state’s electoral referee is simultaneously ruling that the prime minister used a military base as campaign set-dressing. The claim of enemy interference in the vote is at least the second iteration — on 29 September Netanyahu warned of attacks “leading up to the elections” without naming the enemy, and Gadi Eisenkot asked for Yair Lapid to be briefed so it could be shown not to be “a political stunt.” The underlying intelligence remains asserted, not corroborated. Distrust the round numbers first: 6,000, 4,000, 2,000 are the shape of a slogan, not of an intelligence product.